Feedback from a customer about Access 2007

Here is some feedback I received yesterday from a customer. It is nice to see people appreciate the visual improvements.

Overall we are happy with Access 2000 and everything worked (or we had developed workarounds for certain behaviors). However, we looked to Access 2007 for the following features.

Newer look and feel more like the more modern Office/.Net programs of today.

Split forms. This has been on our wish list for a while.

Filtering. Our clients typically have tens of thousand of items in their product database. When they are looking for a ladies ring in 18 karat yellow in a certain price range, of a certain style they need to progressively filter down and see how many hits remain. This is best done with the filtering using the drop downs on the datasheet. The addition of ‘greater than’, ‘contains’ ‘last month’, etc. on the filter list will save lots time on training.Nice Job there!

Enhanced XML support (looks like a good bet for the future).

Save to PDF. I no longer need to have clients buy Acrobat.

We have been with Access since 1.0 (56 documented bugs, 52 of which were resolved in 1.1). Since then we have settled into a very comfortable routine based on incremental changes and improvements with each version.

Access 2007 is not an incremental change; it is a major and significant change in the look and feel as well as the user interface. We found the rearrangement of the interface significantly different and this caused that unfamiliar and therefore unpleasant feeling of having to work within a new environment. That said, and bugs aside, I think this is the best Access ever.